The person who made the Romulan Alphabet for Star Trek did so before the Romulan language was canon

You can tell this because it's lacking 4 or 5 letters that don't exist in english and includes Q which doesn't exist in Romulan XD

Like yes the missing characters are typically presented as two letters to denote pronunciation. But that doesn't mean romulan would have them written together

Also wondering how to lump them together anyway. Words are written top to bottom (in both Romulan and Vulcan)

Guess I know what I'm digging around with after work today >.>

-throws everything off the desk- the stills in TNG are either a whole different rendition of the alphabet or completely random shapes.

I mean, I figured it would be gibberish but set letters but nah. Cool. Either I have to find fandom sources or make some stuff up whole cloth

cool it's not even consistently shown as up/down, sometimes it's side to side. And since it's gibberish I can't tell if it's left to right or right to left. I dooo think I've seen someone flat out say what it is though so I'll spend some time digging around in the old rihan archive

Here we go https://www.geocities.ws...

I can work with this better

still has a Q, but it at least has all the missing characters along with writing rules

why do alien scripts always look like someone never evolved beyond cuneiform? lol

Vulcan is prettier

for romulan i'm more wondering how they would handwrite that and with what utensils

I mean I think it could be with a calligraphy pen, but I also don't think whoever designed it designed it with handwriting in mind but with digital screens so it's possible this is just the digital print version and there's a handwritten version

I just... have no idea what that looks like XD

ah yes, writers vs reality XD

Well also like they didn't create what they didn't need

Lucas writes/speaks something called "Imperial C" which the book never specifies. presumable it uses the english alphabet, at least they could use it without adjusting their keyboards. somehow its a coding language first that also can be pronounced into functional sentences with grammar (tho it seems to lack non-logical expressions)

They needed text for screens/digital billboards basically. And a concept artist for a show isn't gonna go that much further than the need since like time

sadly

But now I'm sitting here on an alphabet that I don't know how to hand write. And Æn'kae who I know can use both languages fluidly (he is awful at language learning, but he learned both very young) but will default to Romulan. But I'd bet his handwriting will pickup Vulcan flourishes.

nooo. Lucas only wanted to know what an Æ is XD

I mean I can compare both since they woulda come from the same base. It looks like Vulcan has a form that is similar to Romulan so maybe the handwritten version has more of the shapes built along a line thing that Vulcan does

Pfffff rip Lucas. At least that's one letter that would for sure be in his name?

Since I'm still trying to decide if proper nouns would have vowels beyond the first vowel of the word when written or not

Other words don't, but they also would be learned so the vowel sound would be intuitive to a native speaker, proper nouns not so much. And Æn'kae's name where kae is actually a Vulcan word even more so XD

Really all he thought was "you are making a sound there that doesn't correlate to any alphabet I know, please elaborate "

Which started my mind on a rabbithole. Language stuff is my most common rabbit hole XD

Part of the reason is the language isn't complete but has pretty complete grammar rules. So like unlike Klingon, which is hammered out enough I was once give Hamlet (in the original Klingon) and a Klingon/English dictionary as a gift, there's a lot of digging through mixed resources and creating stuff but wanting to do it Logically dangit

Fun fact: I never made it through that version of Hamlet and barely looked at that dictionary. Meanwhile i have a bunch of websites bookmarked with Romulan resources and have been saving stuff into a spreadsheet in case more of them vanish (many haven't been updated in almost a decade)

I get it, languages are great. I once went on a deep dive of the Dr who one bc it looks so pretty

...suppose Day would want to learn both languages, now that he lives among them. Just because he can

i'll take that resources too, now i'm stuck on Day figuring out non-human names for himself

Vulcan Dictionary
The this is the newer version of the Romulan Dictionary it has the word generator which is nice but they also have up the cloned older version which has more of the grammar pages and an easier to browse dictionary vs having to search to get anything

neat, thank you! i have meanwhile found a knit pattern for a vulcan caligraphy scarf, might incooperate that in the uniform one i found.